Report: Apple's Smarter iOS Spotlight Will Challenge Google Now

For several years now Apple's Siri has languished in the role of weaker challenger to Google Now in the battle of mobile personal assistants, the still-evolving digital brains in our phones that can carry out voice commands and answer casual queries.

While Siri waits passively for a user to ask it questions, Google Now has always been more predictive and proactive, acting more like a digital butler thanks to Google’s strength in machine learning. It could notify a user out of the blue about traffic conditions on their commute home, or remind them to pick up milk when it senses via GPS that they're in a grocery store.

Now, Apple is reportedly getting ready to shed its "passive" image in assistant technology by unveiling a new service at its forthcoming WWDC developers conference in June.

This, however, will not be an update to Siri.

According to a report from 9to5Mac’s reliably-sourced Mark Gurman, the improved personal assistant tech will be an upgrade to the iPhone's humble Spotlight feature, a search tool that Apple introduced to iOS in 2009.

Adding the new personal assistant functionality to search rather than standalone app Siri is an obvious challenge to Google and it’s historic grip on the market for search. It also means that Apple can deeply integrate the service into iOS itself.

According to Gurman, the souped up Spotlight tool is codenamed ‘Proactive’ and will have access to Siri, Contacts, Calendar, Passbook, as well as third-party apps.

Apple has been working on the project for “several years,” Gurman reports citing sources familiar with Apple’s plans, and its launch will coincide with some big upgrades to Apple Maps, including an “augmented reality view” for local listings.

This could mean that when iPhones users arrive at a particular point of interest they can hold their phone up to view the building through its camera and see additional information about the venue overlaid on the image.

If the user points the phone towards a street, “a virtual outline” of local business, restaurants and shops will show up too, Gurman says, though he adds that Apple may hold back on releasing the "extravagant" augmented reality feature till later.

Apple first gave a taste of what was to come from its Spotlight tool when it released iOS 8, a platform update which included results from Wikipedia — in addition to results from the device — via a search in Spotlight.

Gurman's sources claim that Google clicks have actually fallen since iOS 8’s launch, which is a surprising result given Google’s dominance in search.

'Proactive' will be the result of Apple’s acquisition of several small app developers. In particular, Apple bought the personal assistant app Cue in late 2013 for more than $35 million, according to reports. While that was initially seen as a move to bolster Siri, it now appears Cue’s integration was geared towards broadening the scope of Spotlight.

Cue had a particular focus on the mobile calendar. “We’ve taken an approach that’s a bit different to Google’s,” Cue CEO Daniel Gross told me in an interview in August 2013, before his company was quietly acquired by Apple.

“Google Now’s approach is very opportunistic. It’ll show you a lot of things you’re probably not interested in. Our approach is to look at the one true data store or system that humans use to coordinate their lives, the calendar.”

Cue also aggregated information from a device’s email and contacts to “understand what’s important to your life,” according to Gross, who had spent three years building software that could securely cross-reference and present personal data on a smartphone before the acquisition. At that point he had 14 engineers working for him.

The digital-personal assistants battle is one being waged between the major platforms of iOS, Google and Windows Phone with its assistant Cortana, with lobs being thrown in by third-party app developers like 24me, Wunderlist and Speaktoit.

Earlier this week, Microsoft confirmed it was extending Cortana’s functionality to iOS and Android phones through a cross-platform companion app that worked with a Windows-10 enabled PC, making it the only large player to offer its service across platforms.

I cover developments in AI, robotics, chatbots, digital assistants and emerging tech in Europe. I've spent close to a decade profiling the hackers and dreamers who are bringing the most cutting-edge technology into our lives, for better or worse. I'm the author of